The tyranny of the blank page

A novel solution | Chapter 3

If you’re reading this, I’ve won.

You can’t see it, now, but a boundless plain of white is gazing out at me. A dazzling, immaterial abyss, devoid of content. Full to the brim with anti-content.

It’s a blank page. Identical in form and function to every other blank page. The field of expectant alabaster, the smugly blinking cursor, pulsing with the rhythm of an impatient foot tap. I have been here before — countless times — and yet each new encounter is a confrontation.

A more optimistic voice than mine might interpret a blank page as an opportunity: a chance to start fresh, tabula rasa; every square inch of white gleaming in anticipation of the boundless possibilities of creation. But for a self-loathing pessimist, the blank page is a tyrant, a playground bully sent to prod at the foundations of your self-image. The page in its emptiness, its very bereftness, offers up a wordless challenge:

“Call yourself a writer, huh? Prove it.”

And yet, more often than not, I do come off better in these battles.

Whether it’s down to experience, inspiration, talent, craft or just sheer belligerence, something in me is able to win out against the tyranny of the blank page. Every time I’ve started a freelance writing project, every journal entry, every issue of this newsletter series, when, as revealed last week, I actually started drafting The Chinese Room, all of these represent little victories.

I’m by no means a veteran: there are plenty of writers out there who have stared down more blank pages than me. But if you’ve ever felt daunted by an empty piece of paper, here are a few techniques I’ve found effective in getting over the intimidation.

Disrespect

I read once, somewhere, about an art teacher who, at the start of each semester, encouraged their students to take out their brand new, glossy, unspoiled sketchbooks, place them on the ground, and stomp on them. Scuff them, crumple them, leave them discoloured by autumnal mulch. Disrespect the sketchbooks.

If you hold the blank page in high esteem, if you look at it with reverence, then only your best work will be worthy of it. The possibilities that the pages’ emptiness offers become narrowed by delusions of grandeur, until only a fully-formed masterpiece is worthy of gracing them.

And that is paralysing.

A battered, defeated book, on the other hand, is fit for sketches. Creative bursts, missteps, drafting, iteration, edits and re-edits. Disrespecting the pages allows them to be used imperfectly. And that’s the only way we can start.

If you’re writing with pen and paper, you can apply this advice literally. If you’re working on a computer, you could try mashing the keyboard for a few lines, setting your font to Comic Sans or Wingdings, typing out a rude joke or your favourite swear words, inserting a photo of the underside of your foot. It doesn’t really matter, so long as you break the spell. So long as you disavow yourself of the idea that this must be perfect, first time.

Which leads me nicely on to my next technique…

Write away

Write a bad sentence and delete it. Write a bad sentence and keep it. Write a good sentence and delete it. Write a good sentence and keep it. (Not necessarily in this or any order.)

It doesn’t matter if these sentences are even related to the project at hand. It doesn’t matter if they make it into the final piece, if they ever see the light of day. It doesn’t matter if they’re spelled correctly, punctuated, coherent. It doesn’t matter if they’re not in your own language, or any real language at all.

The important thing is to start.

Breaking the barrier between not having written anything and having written something is often all it takes to break the levee. Once something is there on the page, better, more pertinent words will, most of the time, start to spring to mind. This, I think, is because it is much easier to think around the concrete than the abstract: with nothing at all on the page, our minds are forced to grapple with a concept without form; shadowboxing with the whole idea. And your brain is not equipped to go toe-to-toe with 80,000 words of a novel in one bout.

But with a sentence on the page, even a bad one — perhaps especially a bad one — there is something practical to work on. An opponent to spar with. You can evaluate a bad sentence and think about why it’s bad, how it could be better. You can evaluate a good sentence and think about how to contextualise it, how it might be integrated into the larger piece. You can evaluate a nonsense sentence — a complete non-sequitur — and your synapses start firing with ideas about what this could represent, what meaning this sentence could convey, if tweaked, edited or re-written.

And all of a sudden, you’re writing.

Do it promptly

OK, but what if I can’t think of a sentence? Not even a bad one. Not even a nonsense one.

It happens.

Sometimes, this feeling — the purest form of writers’ block — will simply fade with time and patience. But if you don’t have time, (say, because you’re on a deadline) or you don’t have patience, (say, because you’re me) there are ways to force your writer’s brain into submission.

Start with a writing prompt. There’s plenty of sources out there offering up whole story prompts, but I generally find those trite. Besides, they address a different problem than the one facing us; story prompts want to spark ideas for whole projects, but we want shortcuts for coming up with just a few words on a page. We’re after sentence-level prompts.

The classic and most basic prompt I know is just two words:

“I remember…”

Though rudimentary, this is a good prompt for a couple of reasons:

1. It’s universal: everyone can remember something. (Unless you’re experiencing extreme retrograde amnesia. In which case, your sentence becomes “I remember nothing.” Which is a great opener. Why? What happened?)

2. It’s incomplete: there is an information deficiency in the fragmented sentence which is asking to be filled. This drives me, and most creative people I know, a little crazy. We are curious beings, easily tricked into asking for more information so we can better understand. Give yourself an incomplete prompt, and let the completionist part of your brain do the rest.

3. It’s flexible: the blank can be filled with the utterly mundane “I remember brushing my teeth this morning” right through to the traumatic; “I remember the first time I saw my own bones.”

Now, what you remember might have nothing to do with your project. That doesn’t matter. This is about opening the floodgates. But if that bothers you (because, impatient), take another pass at it. Write about a different memory that is related to your project. Or, if you’re writing fiction, write it from a character’s perspective. What do they remember? How has that event shaped their perspectives and behaviours? What prompted them to think of it, at this point in your story?

Some more prompts I’ve used when feeling stuck:

• Look at an object on your desk and describe it in detail.

• “I’m struggling to write right now, because…” (great if you’re feeling self-combative or journalling)

• “I’ve never told anyone this, but…”

• “I awoke to…”

• “It’s not like you see in the movies,…”

I find it useful to keep a list of prompts like these on a post-it note somewhere near my keyboard. Break glass in case of blank page emergency.

Again, It’s not that these prompts generate great first lines for a novel, or whole narratives. Anything these prompts produce are designed to be torn apart, superseded, deleted with extreme prejudice.

Instead, every one of them switches your brain into writing mode. Stops you from wrestling with the immensity of all that could be, and starts you on the path of manipulating what you have in front of you.

And for me, at least, that’s what gets me past the fear of the blank page.

Now you just have to do it again.

And again.

And again.

This particular once-blank, now-defeated page is being sent out to you on the weekend, rather than midweek.

You could take that as a sign of a particularly hard-won battle, but I’m actually just experimenting with publishing times. This fourth weekly post marks a full month of writing on Substack, and its algorithms are still mysterious to me. If any of you out there has any tips or preferences, let me know.

Next week I’ll be going into how I’ve formatted my draft. I’ll try to find a way to make that less dry than it sounds, so tune in to see if/how I manage that.

The orange button does exactly what you think it does. You’re intelligent people, I don’t have to explain this.